Eight Years On - Titanomachy Revisited

'Most wars start for fairly prosaic reasons.'

New Eden's History of Violence Vol III - Hedion University Archives

It is eight years since one of the biggest, most notorious, most destructive capital ship battles in New Eden history took place.

The Battle of B-R5RB.

A week ago I visited the site for the first time. This is my account.

* * *

Prologue - Tanoo II

When I made the decision to go to B-R5RB I was spending a few days in the Tebu Amkhiman, our Fortizar that symbolically orbits Tanoo II. To be specific, when I made the actual decision I was sat a table smoking a shisha on the terrace of a cafe that is on the main street of an exact replica of a Mishian souk that Directrix Lunarisse has installed here. 

The accuracy of the place is remarkable. Some of it should be impossible because we're inside a space station: sand and dust on the deck; the not-quite-uncomfortably-hot temperature; a light breeze wafting down the street carrying the scents of food and drink and tobacco and other stuff that you might not want to smell; the sounds of people and commerce - a background noise of chatter and barter and debate and argument; and enough overhang in the buildings' facades that you can't quite see that there is no sky if you happen to look up.

There was a holovid on the wall of the cafe playing a music channel. It was my soundtrack as I was randomly paging through my datapad at news articles and I found one that listed the largest space battles in New Eden history in terms of total cost in ISK, and I saw a reference to B-R5RB - the one everyone remembers, the original biggest-ever, the one that made headlines all over the cluster.

I drew a big inhale on the shisha and cast my mind back to when it happened in YC116. I was in my final year at Hedion University and still in the original baseline body my mother gave birth to. My class devoured the holovids and telemetry feeds and cam drone footage from the battle, and we took classes on the tactics involved, and had it drummed into our heads about the importance of paying your bills on time... 

In my time as a capsuleer I'd never got round to visiting the site that memorialises the battle, known as 'Titanomachy'. For some reason I'd forgotten where it was and always believed that B-R5RB was 'up north' and basically inaccessible as it was too deep and too risky to get to.

Then I looked it up on the stargate map on my datapad and realised I'd been an idiot all this time as it was in Immensea, just a few light years away from Tanoo, and that I had every reason to go there now as I owned one of the most powerful covert ops ships in existence - my Pacifier, TES Divinity's Edge.

God willed it.

I literally dropped everything and ran to the Edge's docking bay (I paid my bill at the cafe first. If you don't understand that reference, you will...).

Tanoo is in Derelik. To get to Immensea from Derelik, I needed to pass through the Curse region, so I got to the big Derelik/Curse border gate in the Sendaya system and held station for a while and went through some systems diagnostics, then went through them again, then a third time, just to be sure...

But then again, a ship that may or may not have classified Jove tech in it should feel at home in the ex-Jove space that's named after the disease that made them all leave there, so I dived in.

But nobody was going to catch me today, not at 13.2 AU/s and enough acceleration to achieve that speed in the blink of an eye. With full cloaking/EMCON protocols and nullifiers and these engines and all the other secret CONCORD Aerospace stuff, I was invisible.

This much power can make you complacent, even out here. 

But then I hardly had time to worry about it as soon enough I arrived at the border gate to Immensea and I could see its distinctive blue/white emission nebula in the distance.

 The B-R5RB System in Immensea - 01/16/YC124 - 21:09 hrs

I will refer you to the usual media outlets and search algorithms for more detail on exactly what went down during the twelve-hour battle that happened here (you could start with this one).

In summary, in what you might consider a typical capsuleer mistake, the whole thing started because of a bureaucratic omission. Not an argument, or a loss-of-face, not even a grudge. It happened because of an unpaid sov bill! 

That fact kept replaying in my head - the sheer unbelievability of it - as I got closer to my destination. I jumped into the dead-end, single-gate system and was pleased to see I was the only ship there. I warped to the battle site's marker beacon and just held station for a while, taking it all in through the cam drones.

I've seen Titan wrecks before. I saw 'Steve' once. Most Amarrians have seen the wreck of St. Jamyl's ship in Safizon (peace be upon her) as the wreck is a holy site and indeed a pilgrimage. I haven't seen this many Titan wrecks in the same place.

It's incredible.

Spellbinding.

The sight of any Titan at any time is intimidating, which is the point of them. But even a dead one has the same effect. More than ten of them in the same place is another thing entirely.

These massive ships all shattered, snapped in two, pulled apart.

The wrecks are so big that I speculated that there would still be pressurised compartments in there, holding irradiated corpses with frozen memories of eight years ago. I refrained from finding out because to scan them and establish for sure would be to desecrate the wrecks. In another time or place they might have been classed as war graves and just being here would be illegal, but this is nullsec. 

After the battle, the authorities and the capsuleer community of the time moved quickly to declare the site a monument, as its significance as the largest battle in New Eden's history up to that point - by far - was immediately obvious.

A token boilerplate dome was installed here which has the whiff of ersatz Amarr about it. Kind of kitschy, not really appropriate - because the wrecks themselves are the monument here.

It's not just Titans. There are Dreads, carriers, diminished in scale to bit-part players - afterthoughts.

This battle stands apart from those that eventually surpassed it years later - those other two during the Delve thing - because this one had an element of spontaneity about it. It's always seemed to me like FWS-whatever and the other one had a degree of competition about them, like an intent to set a record for destruction. 

The vulgarity of that.

This one in B-R5RB just happened organically, if you will, and the wrecks are a more morbidly authentic memorial because of it.

But that doesn't mean I admire it. This place inspires awe, sadness and contempt all at the same time; and there are other memorials to it, like the historical record of the price of Tritanium.

I'd like to say this battle is more readily remembered, but then eight years is a long time and I wonder how many new, optimistic, and, let's face it, naive young capsuleers coming out of the AIR cookie-cutter basic training thing today are aware of the existence of this place. What happens in the media feeds on the actual anniversary of this battle will tell you everything you need to know.

With these thoughts riffing through my neuro-linked and enhanced mind, I found I was becoming angry. I shook myself out of it - as much as is possible when your body is jacked into a capsule - and I concentrated on moving Edge around the site, carefully, as small chunks of wreckage occasionally pinged off my shields, and I stopped near one of the big Avatars. Some of their cores still burn. In other wavelengths of light they shine brighter than the system's red giant primary.

I discovered it's actually possible to establish a datalink with the dome. It has a brief explanation of what this place is, and it lists the names of the major participants:

With something like this I always wonder how many of them are still capsuleers or whether any of them have retired or even submitted to permadeath. And I always note how this sort of thing never bothers to list the names of the tens-of-thousands of baseline crew members that will have died in those ships. I said a prayer for them.

I was getting angry again. The thought that all of this was the end result of somebody missing a payment deadline. 

Madness...

I was done here. There was nothing more to say or see or do, which is how it should be. This is not a tourist attraction.

I turned away from the site and prepared to warp out of the system. I left the wrecks to deep time. I'll probably never come this way again as nothing will change within my lifetimes as long as the bureaucrats and nullsec dwellers leave it alone, which the latter certainly will, because of the highly specific code of honour that exists in this part of space. 

From around 10,000 kilometres away, a flourescence of what appears like charged particles is visible surrounding the site. I did not take the time to analyse this phenomenon using my sensor suite, but I speculate it is either fine dust particles from the wreckage interacting with the gas giant's magnetic field, or metal and alloy fragments simply reflecting the red giant's light in the manner of a high altitude cloud. The effect is stunning - almost like a warning.

There is nothing here now but coldness, emptiness, and intense radioactivity with unfathomable half-lives. Nothing will change here for millions of years. The wrecks are massive enough that they will outlast the red giant itself and its inevitable supernova. 

One day, they will be alone with God.

Cassandra Tyrannos

 

Somewhere in Khanid...

There is a Drifter ship that appears to bear my name.

A couple of years ago - possibly before the Triglavian Collective appeared dramatically and cryptically out of nowhere/higher dimensions/abyssal space with those scratchy holofeeds that appeared to show them owning Drifter ships with complete impunity - a new class of Drifter ship appeared in New Eden, classified by CONCORD/DED as a 'Drifter Cruiser'.

I saw one a few months ago. It was doing the same thing that other Drifter ships seem to do, which is loiter around stargates or stations or whatever, indifferent to anything until you try to interact with them. This one was close to one of the Jove Observatories that were so sensational and fascinating seven years ago but are now almost completely ignored by humanity.

We ignore them at our peril.

'Cassandra' and 'her' ship also seemed to function the same way as the battleships do - moving by interacting directly with spacetime through those prongs; the free-floating weapons turrets; the shield thing where it seems to phase in and out of some other state.

The godless ex-Jove/Drifters are playing some kind of long-term waiting game. They were put back in their box by the Triglavians who were, at the end of the day, more proactive about their agenda.

Because I remember all those years ago when the Drifters started their invasion in the system I was based in at the time - Nandeza. I witnessed huge face-offs between the Navy and fleets of Drifters, then they just stopped. A stalemate developed. Then they came and stopped the Drifters and changed the nature of stars and pulled all those systems into abyssal purgatory. For which only God will pass final judgement when the time is right.

Now, today, the Drifters are still fighting them in that place; Drifters are still in Anoikis and their Hive systems, obviously; but there are recent reports of them hitting Upwell structures in nullsec and generally interfering with capsuleer operations, with no obvious endgame. It's like an ongoing harrassment policy towards us.

Testing us.

Waiting...

The thing is, I remember how the 'Autothysian Lancers' (as they're now known), would harvest frozen and hard-vacced capsuleer corpses from dead ships by tractoring them into their abominable insides and taking them off to God-knows-where. The speculation at the time was that they were doing this on the ex-Jove/Drifters' behalf because the godless Drifters were using the corpses to make more Drifters.

Actually reanimating them and producing multiple copies!

So if any of these things have found my podded corpses...

For the love of God, does this mean that all the Cassandra Tyrannos are actually me??!!

No, no, it's just a coincidence. 

I've been out there too long...

It's just a name some intelligence analyst in the DED gave them, like a codename, for a category of hostile ship...

Right..?

No Sleep 'Til Syndicate

The Tactical Operations Centre of Astrahus-Class Citadel 'LUMEN Cathedral of Syndicate', the XS-XAY system, Intaki Syndicate - 01:00 NEST

As may be apparent already, I'm spending more time in the Syndicate lately. In fact as I type this into my datapad, I'm pulling a shift as duty capsuleer-in-command of the citadel's defensive arsenal. Evening prayers were observed before I signed in, and I have another three hours or so in the chair here. Since it's quiet outside - and at this hour nothing is likely to happen - I'm running simulations, readiness checks and inventory assessments on the weapons with the other personnel here, while intermittently monitoring the intel channel for passing traffic and reading some news feeds, with an edition of Aridia Tonight playing on a holovid in the background. I enjoy these quiet contemplative periods that are as enriching at the helm of a heavy weapons battery as they are in my quarters or in chapel.

Such awesome power that God has given me, from 22:00 to 04:00.

* * *

Syndicate is an interesting place. Cosmopolitan doesn't even begin to describe it. There is a lazy trope in circulation which asserts the Syndicate is a 'wretched hive of scum and villainy'. As trite clichés go it is as bad as asserting that 'all Amarrians are slavers'.

It's there if you want it, of course. This is null-security space. But in I-RED's 'pocket' there appears to be a cordial relationship between I-RED and the various Intaki Syndicate operations and we all get along and do business and repel undesirables wherever they are found. At our base in the Cathedral of Syndicate in XS-XAY, we are free to practice our faith as if we were anywhere within the Empire, and we are free to exert God's will on His behalf on anyone passing through the area who deserves it, and life is generally pleasant. A homeostasis of trade exists here. No big power grabs, no wars. Almost self-policing in a way. 

One's word seems to mean more here. Problems get sorted out on their own. 

Syndicate is also close to the Cloud Ring Nebula. It is to me the most distinctive and aesthetically pleasing of all of New Eden's nebulae. I first saw it for real during my first ever 'roam' into the 'CalGal' warzone as a novice capsuleer when I first joined Outdated Host Productions. No book, holo, immersion sim or anything like that can compare with seeing the real thing through cam drones and the image-intensifying algorithms of a capsule.**

It was first suspected to be a supernova remnant by the Intaki astronomer Alnadil Jouber who also theorised that the supernova had produced gravity waves that had destabilised the EVE Gate. This theory is no longer considered plausible as the nebula's rate of expansion proves it to be ancient. Besides, if it was a related event then there would be documentation of the supernova somewhere in the 'fossil record' that comprises the impenetrable and inscrutable jigsaw puzzle of incomplete paleoknowledge that still exists from before the Dark Ages. Somebody, something would have remembered it. I've spent enough time in Relic Sites to be aware of how much random disparate information still floats out there concerning the period.

I tend to transit between the Cathedral and the trade hub in the Dodixie system a couple of times per month on supply runs. Mostly in my faithful Blockade Runner Motorhead, sometimes in a shuttle. Flying back from Dodixie and the Fed means I have the Cloud Ring on the nose, guiding the way, like a pole star, like a Guiding Light - His Light and His Will, no less. It is no wonder it is starting to feel like a second home.

Syndicate, with its Intaki 'city state' stations and its greater capsuleer influence, is what the Fed could have been if it wasn't for the Fed itself.

Solitude, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. They say the new stargate has ruined it...

 **A nebula is normally so faint that you would barely see Cloud Ring (or any of them) with the naked eye even from right inside it. It is truly a gift to be a capsuleer.

Shadow Serpentis Titan Encounter

 

The Syndicate Region - 10/20/123 15:10 hrs

LUMEN has deployed to Syndicate for Operation Oriflamme Threshold: a series of exercises aimed at asserting Amarrian influence in the region against both the Serpentis Corporation and the Fed; and to demonstrate our ongoing support of our allies in the Intaki Business Logistics Union [I-BLU] and the Ishuk-Raata Enforcement Directive [I-RED], who hold significant interests in Syndicate under the 'SynCo' umbrella.

All week we have operated fleets against intruders into SynCo's territory, and against Serpentis ships, eliminating whole squadrons of them, bases, flotillas, 'Forsaken Hubs' with fleets of battleships, probably killing tens of thousands of Serpentis personnel. I have no problem with this as it is God's will that brings us to Syndicate to perform this Inquisition.

Earlier today I was patrolling a few of the asteroid belts in Empress of Amarr in one particular system and generating a considerable amount of Serpentis salvage.

Then this thing showed up:

I couldn't believe it: an actual straight-up Shadow Serpentis Titan.

It was spellbinding. I had just a few seconds to break that spell it was holding over me and engage my cloaking device before it would inevitably blow my ship away.

I sent cam drones over to it. I mean, my God, look at the size of it.

It just sat there. 

Waiting. 

Not even that. 

It just sat there, because capital ships are more like political weapons than actual military weapons. Something about the concept of the 'fleet-in-being' - namely that big ships just have to exist; that you don't have to actually do anything with them in order to force your enemies to respond.

It's the implication of them.

Perhaps our work in the region over the last few days had been registered by the Serpentis Corporation and this was their response. A message, if you will. 

Perhaps this was their response to me.

In that case, I am honoured that they sent the biggest ship they've got.

I watched it for a while, then requested advice from leadership on the comms channels. The bounty on it was 240 million ISK.

The considered opinion was get the hell out of there now... 

Thirteen Shots of Exploding POCO Gantries

 Operation Divine Order

It has become a thing in New Eden where some corporations looking to wage economic warfare engage in a somewhat passive-aggressive tactic of blockading planets and impeding normal trade with them by establishing POCO installation gantries - the temporary structures that are used as a base from which a full-sized POCO structure is built - around a planet and leaving them there: not upgrading them, not building a full POCO out of it, just leaving the empty gantry in orbit around the planet; so anybody running a planetary interaction system and indeed any other form of trade at all to and from the planet is basically blocked. Impeded. Throttled.

Our friends and allies in PIE Inc. (having recently joined LUMEN - you can read the press release here) organised a campaign to eliminate such a blockade in the Zemont constellation, a blockade established by a single-member capsuleer front corporation that is so insignificant I will not deign to name it. Whoever is behind it though, I do not know. But somebody is.

The order was simple: bring maximum firepower. I brought my Legion, Empress of Amarr. 

The results were spectacular:

The operation is ongoing as of the time of this writing. Our mission is to purge Holy Amarr territory of this nuisance. 

It won't take long...

Amarr Victor!